Residential Life

Honors Learning Community

As an honors student at MU, you may choose to live in the Honors Learning Community (HLC). Coed floors reserved for Honors Residence students in Schurz Hall provide you with specials areas for studying and socializing and encourage you to participate broadly in life at Mizzou.

Schurz Hall draws students from the entire campus and has the highest GPA of all residential halls on campus. Renovated in 2008, it offers coed floors that house men and women on different wings of the building in traditional-style rooms. Schurz is located on the eastern part of the MU campus and shares common space with residents of Hatch Hall in the adjacent Bingham Hall. Bingham contains a Campus Dining Services take-out facility called Baja Grill that serves Southwest and Caribbean cuisine. Bingham also contains meeting and study rooms, a large classroom area ideal for study groups, and computer stations for use by residents of Hatch, Schurz and College Avenue complete with printers.

Here’s what some of our honors students have to say about Schurz:

“You only get to be a college freshman once, and living in Schurz allowed me to make the most of my first year at Mizzou. Schurz Hall has the perfect balance of academics and fun with abounding opportunities to get involved outside the classroom. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

—Drew Hensel, pre-med student

“The best part about Schurz is the Honors Learning Community it supports. Homework help, new perspectives, and good lunchtime conversation are never more than a floor away.”

—Andrew Allee, Biochemistry major

“I found living in Schurz very fulfilling. It was great to constantly be surrounded by people who are dedicated to their studies as much as I am. To have someone always there to study or hang out with, the similar interests were great.”

—Taylor Bell, Russian, Biology, Chemistry major

“Schurz provided me with other students that had the same interests as me and students that I can now call my family. My floor went through a lot in our first year of college, but we went through it together and it was great having that big of a support system when I was so far from my family in Iowa.”

— Emily Shoesmith, Biology and Spanish major

Honors Freshman Interest Group (FIG)

A FIG is a Freshman Interest Group, a living-learning community involving about 20 students who live together in the same residence hall and take three classes together in their first semester. FIG students also meet once a week for the 1-credit Freshman Proseminar, a course taught by the peer advisor for each FIG. Peer advisors are usually juniors or seniors in a major related to the subject matter of a FIG.
Each FIG also has a faculty mentor. Honors Freshman Interest Groups (FIGs) are available in a number of interest areas including pre-med, journalism, engineering, business, humanities, and pre-law. In most honors Figs, two of the three courses in the FIG are honors courses or honors sections of regularly offered courses. For more information about FIGs, please visit the Freshman Interest Group website.